If you teach in higher ed, you have probably experienced it.

Despite your best efforts, your entire class seems to start experiencing a huge decline in motivation. What started out well, as you watched your students' curiosities be heightened, now feels like an attempt to lift something well beyond your capacity.

You're experiencing “the dip,” and it is a common occurrence.

You may very well not have done anything wrong, to cause this to happen. However, there are plenty of strategies you can use to bring the motivation back in a course.

1. Kevin Gannon provides resources about student motivation and learning
2. Doug McKee describes ways to engage a larger class
3. The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation provides this handout with some active learning strategies to try
4. Maha Bali reminds us that we can embrace a pedagogy of imperfection in our teaching
5. Heather Yamada-Hosley prescribes some self-care through a yoga routine for people who work on their feet (the more centered we are, the more we have to offer our students)
6. Sarah Rose Cavanagh asserts that “We don't need to coddle. But we do need to care.“
7. James Lang gives us small changes we can make in our teaching during the last five minutes of class, or the first five minutes of class

I recommend putting together a playlist of energizing music to start each class with, not taking yourself (or your class) too seriously, and just being thankful that things are probably going better for you than they are for this guy.

How do you try to address issues of low motivation, midway through your semester/term? 

I just finished listening to a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode with Mike Caulfield on digital literacy that will air on Thursday, February 2.

Not to give too much away, but at the end of the conversation, we chat about the tooth fairy, and other childhood myths. I joke about how I have tended to stay away from controversial topics on the podcast, but that I couldn't resist sharing that my husband and I don't plan on telling our children that there is such a thing as the tooth fairy.

Since I have started down the path of breaking out of my “safe” topics pattern here on Teaching on Higher Ed, I thought I would share two myths about learning that are almost always cause for concern by people who have subscribed to them throughout their career as educators.

We all have one primary learning style that needs to be accommodated for in our learning

I bought into this myth for at least the first ten years of my corporate training career. Now, I'm confident that believing in this myth actually makes our teaching worse.

• All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes
• Letting Go of Learning Styles
• Stop propagating the learning styles myth
• One Reason the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth Persists
• The Myth of Learning Styles

One take-away from the research that debunks this myth is to have multiple approaches for helping learners comprehend what you're trying to teach, instead of gearing the students' experiences toward their preferred learning experience. Consider ways of making your teaching visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, using more than one approach at a time.

I once posted about the learning styles myth on my personal Facebook page, having no idea the topic is as controversial as it seems to be… Please refrain from thinking that showing this myth for what it is (unsubstantiated) does not mean that people don't have learning disabilities. That's an entirely different domain. Yes, dyslexia exists, for example… and there are ways in which we, as educators, should be accommodating for that disability.

If we have learners “practice by doing,” they will retain 75% of what they're “taught”

This learning pyramid has also been propagated across multiple educational contexts. It is meant to encourage us to move up as high as we can on the pyramid, lest we leave people only remembering 5% of what we said. This is not to say that there isn't ample research to illustrate the effectiveness of active learning pedagogical approaches, but doesn't the “tidiness” of these numbers make you a bit suspicious?

• Tales of the Undead…Learning Theories: The Learning Pyramid
• Why the ‘learning pyramid’ is wrong
• The diffusion of the learning pyramid myths in academia: an exploratory study
• Five common but inexcusable learning myths about how we learn

Active learning can help motivate students and help them retain more information. However, the process of learning (and teaching) is far more complex than a diagram like this could ever convey.

Your Turn

What teaching and learning myths have you observed that have persisted for too long now?